1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus, a control method, and a storage medium, and in particular to an image forming apparatus having a plurality of component elements, a control method, and a computer-readable storage medium storing a program for implementing the method.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, multifunctional peripherals having a plurality of functions such as a copy function of printing information read from originals, a function of storing image information, and a function of sending and receiving data via public lines and networks have become mainstream image forming apparatuses. Accordingly, image forming apparatuses have come to be provided with processing capacities equal to those of information processing apparatuses such as personal computers (PC) and have devices such as a hard disk drive (HDD) connected thereto as in the case of information processing apparatuses.
In an image forming apparatus comprised of a plurality of component elements such as an HDD, when one of the component elements is removed or replaced, and access timing which the component element has is different from access timing which the other component elements have, access cannot be normally made. In this case, there arises a problem that the image forming apparatus provides an error indication and becomes unusable.
To address this problem, there has been disclosed a method in which a status of connection of a peripheral device to the image forming apparatus is checked at power-on, and an error indication is provided when there is a difference between the present connection status and a previous connection status (see, for example, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication (Kokai) No. H08-202207).
However, according to the method described in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication (Kokai) No. H08-202207, there may be a case where an access error occurs due to a difference in the characteristics of a component element such as a peripheral device before and after replacement thereof, and the image forming apparatus becomes unusable. Therefore, it is required that countermeasures be taken so that the image forming apparatus can be used without an error indication when a difference in the characteristics of a component element is minute.